{"id":555,"date":"2009-03-26T12:00:06","date_gmt":"2009-03-26T18:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/i-went-through-your-guyss-notes\/"},"modified":"2011-05-31T10:13:16","modified_gmt":"2011-05-31T16:13:16","slug":"i-went-through-your-guyss-notes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/wordpress\/blog\/2009\/03\/i-went-through-your-guyss-notes\/","title":{"rendered":"“I went through your guys’s notes.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I heard this yesterday morning on National Public Radio.<\/p>\n

Problem:<\/strong>
\nThe possessive form was wrong.<\/p>\n

Explanation:<\/strong>
\nAn NPR reporter had recorded someone saying to a group of people, “I went through your guys’s notes.”<\/p>\n

Without any more context to help you, you can see that there are two possible interpretations for this statement:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The speaker was saying that he had read the notes of the guys who belonged to or were associated with his listeners.<\/li>\n
  2. The speaker was saying that he had read the notes that belonged to his listeners.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    If the full context were such that interpretation #1 were correct, then the solution would be to remove the final “s” from “guys’s” in the statement.<\/p>\n

    However, the full context of the recording was someone speaking directly to a group and not<\/em> referring to anyone else.<\/p>\n

    So interpretation #2 is the correct one.<\/p>\n

    One can then almost see the train of thought of the speaker when he started to say, “I went through your guys’s notes.”<\/p>\n

    Step 1<\/u>: The speaker usually says “you guys” instead of “you” for the plural, second-person pronoun.<\/p>\n

    Step 2<\/u>: Starting to make a possessive out of “you guys”, the speaker changed “you” to “yours”.<\/p>\n

    Step 3<\/u>: Realizing that “your guys” sounded as if he were referring to people other than his listeners, the speaker added the possessive apostrophe-“s” to “guys” to create “your guys’s”.<\/p>\n

    Now here is the sad part about this NPR report: The man who was recorded saying the statement “I went through your guys’s notes.” was directly involved in a job-interviewing activity.<\/p>\n

    Ouch!<\/p>\n

    Solution:<\/strong>
    \n“I went through your notes.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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